How to Plan a Trip

How to Plan the BEST Vacation For You & Your Family!

Deciding to take a vacation is exciting!

We’ve planned vacations all over the world for ourselves, family, friends and clients for years. So to help you plan the best vacation for you and your family, we’ve compiled our major tips / tips / advice / resources here into one page.

2. Type of Vacation

Decide what type of vacation want to have. Is it going to be just a relaxing getaway? An active vacation? Lots of sightseeing? Or a combination? This will really help you when it comes to researching.

3. Research

Once you know the answers to the first two questions, then you are really ready to start researching your trip. Hopefully, that’s why you are here on our site! We’ve got 500+ plus blog posts on this site to help you out.

4. Planning Tools / Templates

It depends on your personality how much you really want to get into this part. I think it’s really important to use some type of tools to help gather information about your trip. Whatever works for you is most important. However, we’ve given you links to our own planning tools / templates and even sample travel itineraries to help make it easier for you!

5. Booking

Now that you’ve finalized your ideas and done the research, it’s time to start making bookings!

6. Packing & Final Preparations

This is always such an exciting part of the planning process! I love getting everything organized for my trip and packing (sometimes weeks in advance). I lay everything out, make checklists, and countdown to the departure date!

While every person is a bit different, these are the primary steps we take for planning a trip. And we hope that this outline and the tools / resources we’ve included here on this page will help you plan the best trip ever!

Booking Tools & Resources

Flights

Car Rental

Hotels

Booking.com is one of our favorite online hotel booking tools that we often use for our travels. They have a good selection of a variety of quality accommodations with good rates, and we often find deals with breakfast included. Using the convenient search box below, you can begin searching deals right away!

Our other go-to favorite hotel booking tool! With one of the largest selections of accommodations from around the world (especially in Asia), we have found Agoda to be a great booking tool.

Not only is it user friendly and easy to filter, but we have found great deals! Use the search box in the side bar to find hotels now, or use the button below to go to their site.

Activities / Tour Tickets

View & Book Awesome Activities HERE!

We partner with multiple tour / activity operators to provide our readers with the most comprehensive list of things they can do. Take some time to search all of them – because some offer exclusive activities that you can’t buy elsewhere and prices may vary too. So search around all 3 of the websites below, and find the BEST option to to make your vacation GREAT!

1. Get Your Guide

Get Your Guide is a partner that we really love due to their prices and great selection of fun & unique activities in popular tourist destinations all around the world!

2. City Discovery

City Discovery is also another platform that we partner with. We particularly like some of their hop-on / off options in popular cities around the world as well as many of their other activities! Click the banner below to search their deals!

3. Viator

Viator is one of the most popular activity / tour booking platforms out there. They offer some high quality tours & activities in some of the most popular vacation destinations. Be sure to check out their City Passes to get into multiple museums and tourist sites all for one price! Click the banner below to search their deals!

Downloadable Itineraries & Planning Templates

Other Tools / Downloads / Sample Itineraries (various destinations)

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Our Travel Planning Tips & Advice

Josh and I enjoy a variety of accommodations when we travel. However, we have realized that when we first decide to visit a destination we always tend to look up hostels first. While it's true that not all hostels are created equal, there are some pretty great ones...

People often think that you need to have a lot of money in order to travel, but that's not actually true. The key is how you choose to spend the money that you have, and how you choose to save money for vacation. People tell me all the time how much they would love...

Being the frequent travelers that we are, we often get asked how we can afford to travel so much. And while we enjoy the good life of luxury hotels as much as anyone, the fact is we couldn't afford to travel if we stayed in luxury hotels. Honestly, we often choose to...